I walk the tracks to work sometimes. ecib and I both walk these tracks, and we are making a stockpile of rail spikes that we find. They wiggle out:

These were invented by Robert Livingston Stevens in 1832. It seems that after 187 years, a simple modification might have been made to keep them from wiggling loose. Maybe a bit of a bump about an inch down from the head?

You might have noticed I made a few little tweaks to the site. I am going to make a few more.

I was in Norway with steve and mike last weekend. It was amazing. We made a small boat and lit it on fire.

You say they wiggle out like that's a bad thing. Any fastener has a failure mode. A spike that gradually wiggles out still has some holding power (mainly needed horizontally) while clearly advertising its weakened condition to a casual inspection. A bump wouldn't increase spike-to-wood contact area much, and could weaken the connection above the bump.

Screws are also used, the cost of pre-boring holes reduced by automated equipment.

Nails haven't evolved much either. I suspect that's because the design and manufacture of wood hasn't changed. I mean, it has - you use different fasteners for glulam - but fundamentally, your other choice is screws.

Just kissed my family goodbye. They're off to work and school and I have a 4pm flight back to Los Angeles. Fortunately I have four work days, two days off, one work day and I'm back for a good eight months next Wednesday.

I've ridden 11500 miles on the LA river. If all goes to plan, I have a mere 150 miles to go and then I never have to ride it again.

Dammit I'm still tired from last week. Research keeps moving forward -- I went through the paper that got accepted and was surprised; at the time of writing I thought it was mostly garbage, but it's not half bad -- and plenty of space to extend the work into a bigger publication. (Hard to do much of significance in 7 pages!)

I figured out that I'm going to send that letter, and I figured out what the end of it is. It's not "never talk to me again", but it is "your willingness to change, or not, determines what happens to our relationship." Que sera, sera.

Thank you for the constant chicken updates. I haven't seen them mentioned explicitly, but I look forward to them every week!

Glad you're feeling better about your paper, I'm sure it was hard to see its value while you were so close to the ideas. Best of luck with that letter, I remember you talking about how difficult it was to write. You're doing a good thing for yourself, I think :)

You guys open the doors early here. Taking my brother to the airport this morning after a successful trip. We went all over town and did some awesome things. These things included, getting drunk at Dave and Busters, getting drunk at a beer festival, getting drunk playing board games, and we visited the Getty museum.

Back from a crazy trip to Norway and England. Great to see mk and mike and dccrux on the fjord. Some last minute flight changes (thanks United) extended the trip (unpleasantly) for several hours, but hey- I’m home and slept in my own bed last night.

Back to the half-empty pint, I suppose! Think I'll ever stop being several days late to pubski? Tune in next week to find out!

I had surgery on my leg this last Tuesday. They installed plates, positioning screws, and two of what my surgeon called "Deck Screws." Apparently it's more broken than they thought it was, so I have more hardware than they told me I would have. Evidently the surgery was almost twice as long as the 1.5 hours they predicted. I'm not sure if that's....supposed to happen? I mean, my surgeon had an X-ray AND CT scan. I guess there must be more to see when you actually open it up.

Aside from that, though, the surgery went well. I was in a ton of pain when I woke up from anesthesia, but it's been coming and going with the swelling. My full-time job right now is to keep my leg elevated. I've been in a bit of a haze since operating, trying to manage my pain with the prescribed opiates and figure out how quickly I can stop taking opiates. I went from 8 pills on Tuesday and Wednesday, 6 yesterday, and 3 today. My goal is to completely replace them with a rotation of ibuprofen and acetaminophen. I mean, I kicked smoking a month and a half ago - it'd be a shitty time to pick up a new addiction, wouldn't it?

So, yeah. That's the long-and-short of what I've been up to. I haven't been lucid enough to enjoy Hubski's type of thoughtful content in the last week, so I'm sorry that I've been missing! I'm sure you all missed my...ability to quote articles and restate the central premises...? Hah.

Don't for a minute pretend that you don't contribute to the tenor around here. Congrats on still not smoking.

X-rays and CT scans will tell you where the breaks are. Not a surgeon but there may have been difficulty in getting things patched up in a way that wouldn't lead to excess soft tissue damage. Back when I did biomedical we had engineers who would look at the x-rays of orthopedic surgery and comment that "they might be great doctors but they're terrible carpenters." Our doctor's rep quipped "you try building a cabinet through a 1-inch hole that's bleeding."

The last month has actually made it pretty easy! No craving is ever going to outweigh day-after-surgery pain. Since it's almost entirely psychological at this point and I've been lucky enough to have problems big enough to distract me, the cravings have been almost non-existent!

I got a wisdom tooth removed monday morning. I tried to get my previous dentist to do it eight years ago when I still had insurance, and again five years ago when I was still flush with Norwegian money but they wanted to "wait and see if it corrects itself". Now I don't have dental insurance, and the surgery that they promised me in april would be done before the summer was postponed until now. I was pretty bitter about it going in, but it turns out prescription painkillers dulls the pain post-surgery and the pain of wrestling with Vray and Photoshop all day on my university's underpowered computers.

I took another look at my receipt and apparently the social insurance agency paid for roughly half of it. I still had to pay almost €400, but it feels a bit embarrassing to complain about healthcare costs among Americans...

...it turns out prescription painkillers dulls the pain post-surgery and the pain of wrestling with Vray and Photoshop all day on my university's underpowered computers.

Don't know what they've got you on, but I tried programming while on hydrocodone the other day. It went...poorly. Hope the creative part of our brains function a little nicer on the meds, for your sake :)

Our home improvement project has stalled out. Ducts are full of water. Gotta get some HVAC person out to make them less so.

Steph grew some Reapers and is trying to ferment them. Peppers are a dick to ferment. So we finally have picked up some glass weights and vacuum seal lids to handicap the odds in our favor. Last couple of batchs of peppers we tried to ferment ended up molding.

Apparently I'm becoming a bit of a public speaker...I'm giving a presentation at a GIS conference tomorrow. Another presentation on Friday to my company's coordination team to propose a new way of doing product development. Handed in a paper to present in Belgium at another conference later this year.

And, best of all, I heard Friday that I get to fly to Milan next week to present our EV charging station location tooling, as part of a trade mission event organised (and fully funded) by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So while it's kinda against my principles to fly up and down to Italy just for one thing...it makes a bunch of business sense to do so and it's an exciting opportunity for me.

I moved back in with my parents. This happened at the beginning of the month when my old lease expired and I couldn't be half assed to find another place to live. It didn't help I was going back to school. But then the emotions started to rise until it reached a bit of an unbearable boiling point. I gotta vent.

First, the physics. I'm sitting in oscillations and waves class right now with my friends. The prof is literally dressed like Kevin Flippin' Parker. Long hair too. Non-stop jokes about doing math for fun and romance. That's right, friends. I was sulking, trying to avoid making friends due to sheer embarrassment out of the flaming ashes of my failed political career and in spite of that I still ended up making more friends than I did the entire time I was in political science. How did that happen? How do you purposely avoid talking to everyone and end up with more friends than when you genuinely tried?

So there's that baggage, but it's irrelevant. Maybe I'm not as much of a cunt who doesn't want to be "nice" as I thought. Four months ago I was on a cruise watching the world go by and lettin' shit slide while an older dude in line turned to me and exclaimed "this is worse than Vietnam." Now?

My younger brother is working for Dad. So is my older brother. Out of 3 kids in the family I'm the only one who isn't working for Dad. There's nothing wrong with that, but 2 years ago you didn't give a fook and were lettin' shit slide. Now you're "doing this temporarily" until you go to uni for your B.S. in computer science. Okay, fine. Wait, now you hate school, now you want to make that your career and you're subtly suggesting (without DIRECTLY saying) I drop out and you love your job. Saying shit like "oh, may be your anxiety will go away once you start WORKING. I have a job you asshole. And there are more important things in my life than #middleclass while running unit tests on Java backends. Mainly not making major life decisions based on fear and moving your entire material existence in the exact same way as your parents. Both your parents. Who worked for the same company as their parents. Can you start to see the trendline emerge? Holy shit, I need a linear regression.

But that's clearly asking too much. I should be grateful I woke up this morning. I should be grateful to work for Dad. I should be grateful to live in a first world country. I should be grateful my parents are still trying to do everything for me like I'm a child who can't catch a bus or do his laundry or schedule an appointment or show up for work on time. 99% of people work for their dads, and that's just social hierarchy.

So I can't confide to him. Or my parents. I can in my friends though, who after a depressing comment and a confrontation told me that they think my real passion is art and I gotta join the circus. Which is basically true but it always suxxx balls because a career in art is a way to fast track yourself to The Edge(R). Anything beats working for Dad. My family are lovely people but sooner or later you can't escape the hell of other people's perceptions. Eventually it becomes a subtle form of gaslighting, even if it's borne of love and well-meaning. I get it. We're going to live and die by the corporate grind whether we want to or not but does it have to be your dad? Can't it be someone else's dad for once? Imagine genuinely being proud of that. Going from peace and love to shitting on everyone who isn't a low-level I.T. goat and working for your dad your entire life (but there's nothing wrong with that and reality zux. The older I get, the less real the world seems. Like God is just creating identical characters and fuckin' with the stats slightly.

So I'm looking for another apartment but it's probably too late now that school is underway. Then I woke up obsessively early at like four in the morning and drove to Starbucks. I then drove my car around aimlessly for a bit, listening to music I recorded and old Bastille and Naked and Famous records. Hayzus.

Anyway, that's just the fax, no printer. Peace, love, flower power, good planet, good feast and even if I end up digging ditches 10 years from now I still love you more.

Sub-optimal commute Tuesday morning as I received confirmation that it's time for new bike tires a mile away from the office. I changed the tube anyway and the new tube blew up as I used my third-to-last CO2 canister to inflate it. A 20-minute walk isn't so bad, if you haven't already spent 20 minutes getting your hands filthy and you don't have to push a bike on the bike path.

The new tires are the first made-in-Germany product I remember buying since the Audi we nicknamed The German Patient. Hopefully the tires will last longer than the car. I managed to get the rear tire mounted at work without my tire levers (a plastic knife broke and I found that stubborn thumbs can manage) and used my second-to-last CO2 canister to top it off after inflating with a hand pump. (Not quite: the recommended pressure is 110 PSI and I'm not sure if I reached half that; my car pressure gauge is useless for Presta valves.)

Heading home now with a single CO2 cartridge and mismatched tires, hoping the front won't die of old age and the rear won't pinch flat.

I ran Zafiros and ate an inner tube every two weeks (300 miles). I switched to a pair of Schwalbe Marathon Plus and I've gone 2500 miles without a flat. I've heard good things about the gatorskins but a friend borrowed my bike and brought it back with a Marathon on the back; I got home with a wood screw sticking out both sides and decided not to hunt too much more.

My inflators won't get my 700s over 55 psi. However, 700s will roll fine at 55psi. I also carry an alcohol wipe. The optical ones are the right size, they last forever, and they keep your grips from turning gray the minute you have to change a tire.

Turns out that I am relying too much on wrist strength, and not using my arm/bicep/shoulders enough when I'm really working hard on something.

So. Intra-muscular sugar-water injections to reduce the inflammation. Massage. Hot/Cold treatments. And Physical Therapy to learn how to use ALL of my body's muscles, not just the easy ones.

RELIEF.

I was panicked that Carpal Tunnel had finally gotten me, or that I was bordering onto chronic issues that would (maybe) prevent me from riding my motorcycles any more, or having to wear a wrist brace for ever, or even get surgery.

Turns out NONE of that is in the cards for me.

I walked down the hall from my Doctor's office, and into the Physical Therapists' office, since she happened to have a cancellation, and I was there already.

So I am already on the road to recovery. And my arm is sore. Intramuscular injections and tennis elbow will do that to ya, apparently.

Doing Handstands

OH! And I admitted to my PT that I have a goal to learn how to do handstands, as a part of my getting-more-fit push. Now that I've lost 40 pounds, I need to begin stretching regularly, and do some fitness training to increase my core and upper body strength.

Learning to do handstands is a practical way to do all those things, while also being able to measure my progress as my handstand skillz increase.

Turns out she LOVES to do handstands, and is great at it. She's also a 6-foot tall blonde who is super fit and fun and energetic, so the inspiration is there for me, as well. :-)

I'm very glad for you that it's nothing permanent. I don't know much about it, but CPS is a fear of mine too, considering I've spent probably two-thirds of my life behind a screen. It's the reason I am so happy with my Extremely Expensive But Totally Worth It Herman Miller Aeron.

I watched two films in the past week to build up some breathing room for my kaiju reviews as I've come to discover that trying to watch films on any set schedule is actually quite difficult if I don't want to make them a priority. None of the films I've watched recently are Godzilla v. Destroyah and I think it's because I'm putting it off cause I have very strong feelings around that film, though not necessarily about the film itself. So, whatever. I need to just sit down and force myself to watch it and talk about it, otherwise it'll never actually get done. Ditto for the other two films in the Rebirth of Mothra Trilogy.

iNaturalist

There aret wo birds I truly love, The American Crow and The Turkey Vulture, that I want to submit observations of to the site. Both of which are super common and I see almost literally every day. Yet somehow they're never anywhere to be found when I have my camera out, or if they are, I see them long enough just to be able to watch them disappear, or worse yet, I do get a shot, but the subject is too dark and blurry to be identifiable. It's maddening.

Hey, guys! New here. I've been lurking for a little while and decided to finally make the jump into making an account. Love the quality of discussion here, and I'd like to one day start participating. For the meantime, I'll be lurking away!

Recently moved out of my family's place. I had a terrible case of homesickness during the first couple of weeks, but that's beginning to dwindle away. What helped was finally taking up some Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes, which I've always wanted to do, and getting to know my roommates and my co-workers. I don't feel too alone now, so hopefully that means I'm making progress. The first couple of weeks, every time I left work to get to my place, I felt such a crushing sense of emptiness and loneliness.

I heard depression once described as a perpetual homesickness. I'm sorry for anyone who has to go through that on a constant basis.

New user here. (really TNG). I would have no clue what to do if I was new. I'd be trying to find a way to post content, but that doesn't exist for newbies. With the new "math problem" when signing up, do we need to limit a newbies ability to make a post? mk?

Yeah we were getting like one spam account per minute at one point, and our email was blacklisted. It was grim, and the Google captcha doesn’t help much. I can now add an email verification step and see if that helps. Maybe I can lift the posting restriction, or at least explain how to get the ability to post.

I kinda like the math problem though. It didn’t work long until I made it date dependent.